Ghouljaw and Other Stories (6 page)

Appearing momentarily startled, Casey looked up at his father; but he obviously read playfulness in his dad’s expression. “Yeah, right.” As they passed under the amber halos of streetlamps lining the sidewalk, Casey drew his fingers into little claws and gave a mournful, imitative moan. Now it was Casey’s turn:
“Give me back my bones!”

They were nearly clear of Main Street when Casey said, “Do you believe in ghosts?”

“Well,” Bill began, taking the same tone as when one of his students caught him off-guard. He glanced over at Casey, a sincere little frown between his large eyes. Sometimes he looked so much like Vicky. Panels of shadows passed over the boy’s face as they moved through sparse light. “I suppose I don’t.” In his periphery he saw Casey’s shoulders slump as he turned away. “But it’s all supposed to be for fun, right?” Casey mumbled something. Bill scratched his cheek. “I mean, what would Halloween be without ghosts?” This time there was no reply.

Bill slowed at an intersection, idling under a red light for a few seconds before it clicked to green and he steered onto Northeastern Avenue. After several minutes without speaking, Bill said, “Do you believe in ghosts?”

Casey, hands folded neatly on his lap, peered out the passenger window. His small voice was resolute. “I think ghosts are real.”

Bill gave an earnest nod. “And there’s nothing wrong with that, son.
I
believed in ghosts at your age.”

Casey shifted a bit, glancing askance at his dad. “Really?” His tone was more eager than incredulous.

“Sure,” Bill said, steering onto the road which led directly home. “You may not believe this, but when I was a kid—although quite a bit older than you—me and some of my friends used to ride our bikes out to the Aikman farm.”

“Seriously?” Casey pressed forward against the taut seatbelt. “That lady wasn’t making that up? The Aikman place is real?” He was beaming, the energy of their special evening returning.

“If I’m lying I’m dying,” Bill said, trying to sound at ease.

“What was it like?”

“The Aikman place?”

“Uh-huh,” said Casey.

“Well,” Bill took a deep breath and squinted as if straining to see through fog. He was back in front of his classroom, back in control. “It was a deserted farmhouse out on Haymaker Lane, mostly a place kids dared each other to explore—coaxing one another to run up and knock on the front door on Halloween, that sort of thing. The house was”—he struggled for the right words—“exactly something you’d imagine a haunted house would look like: two stories with a few dormers around the top . . . a sagging porch around the bottom. I don’t think anyone really knew why it’d been abandoned.”

He trailed off. Bill didn’t know if this was true or not. He’d always just accepted (and perpetuated) whatever legend or lie was circulating at the time:
The Aikman woman murdered her husband and kids and buried them in the root cellar before hanging herself from the rafters out in the barn. . . . The Aikman’s eldest son came home from college during winter break and poisoned the entire family Christmas morning before dumping the bodies out in the limestone quarry out east. . . . The Aikman father smothered his wife and kids while they slept, placing their corpses in the cornfield shortly before tumbling them to pieces in the rusty pickers of his combine at harvest time
. Grim as it may have been, Bill had always relished the autumn elements of the last legend, but was reticent to share any of these particular tales with his impressionable son.

Yet beneath all this there was that persistent image—the impression he’d suppressed since long before the library—of Vicky at the top of the stairs, only now it had taken on the photographic effect of a negative—all the colors inverted . . . the whites to black and blacks to white: Vicky, her teeth now pearly black, her penetrating pupils had reversed to white marbles rimmed with black sclera, her once dark hair now shredded gray drapes. Bill stifled himself from murmuring,
Not real
.

“Dad?”

Bill shivered. “Hm?”

“Why do you keep saying
was
?”

Bill said, “How do you mean?”

“Like”—Casey licked his lips—“you keep saying
was
and
looked
and
used to be,
and I want to know why everything is in the past.”

His son’s question had momentarily rendered Bill without words; he haplessly stammered for a few seconds before saying, “Stories, tales, are written that way—with all those past-tense verbs—so that we can. . .”—he was desperate to conclude his impromptu lecture—“. . . so that we can better understand the past, and help us know more about ourselves now in the present, and maybe far off in the future.”

Casey’s face was stern. “No, I mean, is the house still here in town? Is the farm somewhere out there?” He gestured vaguely at the screens of trees, at the passing fields of parchment-colored cornstalks.

Bill inadvertently twitched a frown, uncertain. “Yes.” He supposed the sprawling property was still owned by the Aikman relatives.
But the house?
It was beyond condemned twenty years ago; it had surely collapsed by now.
Or it was burned down by hoods
. “I don’t know why it wouldn’t be out there.”

Casey waited a while before speaking. “Can we go see it?” Bill was already shaking his head before verbally dismissing the suggestion, but Casey pounced on his father’s hesitation. “Oh, please. We’re already having such a good time . . . it would be like an adventure and it would be such a nice memory . . . please?”

Bill stopped shaking his head.
A nice memory
. Guilt now. Guilt again. An odious title wormed its way into his head:
widower’s kid
. He sucked in a breath. “Casey”—his delivery was sober, determined—“if we drive out there, we’re only going to look, okay? Nothing else—we stay in the car, got it?”

In the dim light cast from the dashboard, Casey’s smile was radiant. “Oh, I promise, it’ll only be for a minute.”

Bill turned the car around in a gravel driveway.

A sepia-mottled moon was lying rather low on the horizon, giving the illusion of being trapped in the black lacework of tree limbs. They coursed along back roads, which grew narrower as they drew closer to the secluded Haymaker Lane; and each time that black-and-white image of Vicky reasserted itself, Bill distracted himself by entertaining Casey with another elaborately fabricated legend. All lies.

The house on the hill was worse than Bill could have imagined or described. Of all the things he’d told Casey, nothing could have prepared him for what the car’s headlights fell on. A wood-decaying horror.

After finally arriving on the cattail-lined lane, Bill had pulled the car partway into an overgrown driveway. Casey complained that he couldn’t see the house from the road. It was true—a jagged wreath of elms and pin oaks had created a barrier around the house, which was nothing more than a shapeless, night-shaded mass within the inky tangle of trees. Begrudgingly, Bill eased off the brake and the car crept forward. Making their way up the hill, he and Casey jostled and jounced over the rutted trail. Bill heard odds and ends rattling around in the glove compartment—matches, maps, junk.

Now, with the engine idling and the headlights creating a torn curtain of shadow against the house, Bill said, “Well, this is it,” startled to find his voice so thin.

With the exception of the high attic dormers, the windows had been completely knocked out—by vandals, Bill assumed—leaving only shards of glass around the casings. With the mullions and sash bars having been broken away, the black rectangles gave the illusion of absorbing light; and even with that stark illumination falling over the house, it did little to bring any color to it. The paint had faded and flecked away, exposing rotting wood-plank siding, giving the exhausted structure a uniform slate appearance.

The whole place had been intimidating to Bill when he was fifteen, but now the dwelling had an almost cognizant quality to it. With the moon glowing on the other side of the house, the crooked columns supporting the sagging porch gave the illusion of crouching spider legs. And all at once, the circle of trees seemed like skeletal sentinels—vacantly faithful suitors holding a vigil at the skirt of this abused muse. It was remarkable but, in the silence of the car, Bill felt the image of the house transform into the medium of actual sound, a warbling whisper—the voice of the librarian.
Go away,
it repeated in a reedy cadence.
Leave this alone
.
Go away
.

A spell of silence had settled into the car. “Turn off the headlights,” Casey whispered, his face fixed on the house, a smile playing at the edges of his mouth.

Bill surprised himself with the ease at which he complied. Yes: this had the potential of being an indelible father-and-son memory; but they were beginning to traipse too close to the sensible threshold of Bill’s comfort zone. Under the moonlight, the wild lawn acted as a dark blanket spiked with slivers of chrome.

After a while, Bill said, “We’d better get going, it’s—”

“I want to go up there.”

This time there was absolutely no negotiation—with either himself or his son. He needed to regain some semblance of control. “No, Casey.” He flicked on the headlights, re-illuminating the hideous face of the house, the open cavity that used to be the front door looked like a frozen howl. “I frankly feel a bit foolish for trespassing.”

Bill was reaching for the gearshift when Casey said, “Dad?”

“Mmm?”

The boy’s voice was soft, plaintive. “Will Mom ever come back as a ghost?”

After a second or two, Bill sank back in his seat. He’d rehearsed his answers for years, never properly polishing an adequate response. But each time, Bill had drifted back to the circumstances of Vicky’s death, and his explanations had been distorted by embarrassment and perverted by resentment. What was he going to tell him?—
Your mother was sad sometimes, and it got worse after you were born
. . . . Never.
Your mother was killed in a car wreck . . . she’d gone out for cocktails after work with a man from her office, a man daddy didn’t like. A clerk at a local hotel said they’d spent a few hours in a room that evening before abruptly checking out. The man was probably driving mom back to pick up her car when he clipped a guardrail, resulting in a really awful accident. The guy lived, your mother didn’t. We went to the funeral . . . you were little, you didn’t understand . . . we threw dirt on her coffin.
Christ—never.

As if a black straitjacket tightening around the fringes of his mind, the claustrophobic truth enclosed Bill’s conscience.

“No,” Bill said, “she won’t come back.” He glanced over at the pale shape of his son. Silence hung between them like a solid thing. Bill peered through the windshield, the moon’s reflection making a silver Rorschach shape on the hood of the car. “But, son, you have to know that your mother—”

In a blur, Casey unfastened his seatbelt and shoved open the passenger door.

Bill stammered—“Casey!”—and fumbled for his own door handle, making a feeble attempt to give chase before getting yanked back down by his seatbelt. He had the brief glimpse of his son running through the untended grass before disappearing between in the columns of tree-trunk shadows.

Bill scrambled out of the car, sprinting up to the house. “Casey!” he called out, frantically scanning the front yard. Not knowing where to begin, Bill darted around the side of the house.

Casey was standing in the side yard, reverently facing a long row of broken windows. Bill’s initial impulse was to forgo speaking to the boy, but rather clutching hold of his son and spanking him all the way back to the car. Instead, relief spilled in to Bill.

“Casey?”

His voice was hushed. “Yes, Dad?”

Bill was panting. “Damn it, don’t ever do that again.”

“Sorry, Daddy. But I wanted to see up close—I wanted to see all that.” Casey gestured at something through the hollow socket that had once been a first-floor window. The tall grass made sibilant, hissing sounds as Bill sidled up next to his son, slipping his hand into Casey’s. He was preparing to formulate some sort of scolding before glancing inside the house, into what used to be a parlor or living room. Bill was now as mesmerized as Casey. Helplessly, his mind was pushed backward, back down to his fifteen-year-old self; and while many of these memories had remained smudged and obscure, the sensation of physically confronting the Aikman place had the effect of adjusting focus, bringing definition through an internal lens.

A memory came.
The
memory came. A group of teenagers, Bill one of them, a gang of six or seven local kids who’d been running together that summer, a mix of guys and girls. Victoria Sanford was there. Since elementary school, Bill had had a crush on Vicky (most guys did), but she was “wild.”
Wild
—that was the term Bill’s mother often used. Bill’s term would have been “out of my league.” Although years later in college, he would learn a more accurate word: “indomitable.”

Because of her exotic complexion, Vicky had always reminded Bill of a firmly built Indian girl: nutmeg skin, long, coffee-colored hair, and eyes so deeply chestnut that they verged on black. Throughout their elementary and middle school years, he liked most everything about her. Except, sometimes, her laugh. It took on a coarse quality as they entered their teens. It was as if there was something bitter inside her laugh now, like specks of glass in an otherwise welcomed breeze.

And there had been gossip—by adults, mostly—that Vicky’s “wild” behavior was a result of her parents’ separation and eventual divorce, something about her father—something he did; there were even hushed discussions about “it” being something he’d done to Vicky.

It had been overcast that afternoon in July, the sky an endless tumble of soot-dusted cotton. The group leaned their bikes against trees in the front yard of the abandoned farmhouse. Inside the former dwelling they found only a few interesting items—a rust-rimmed sink with some shattered plates, a fireplace in which someone had tried to burn a shoebox full of Polaroids. The floorboards had creaky-weak spring to them, as if a section might collapse and send someone plummeting into the root cellar.